Day 1: "Toward Morning—Nyamathaam’im—‘Abíní" and "The Tendency"

It’s our luck to invite you to be alongside CIB and our ASU and larger artistic and scholarly communities for two new initiatives, “Toward Morning—Nyamathaam’im—‘Abini” and “The Tendency,” which will take place together, in a convening of lectures, performances, and responses by some of the most generous and rigorous artists and scholars at work today. Our new CIB Professor of Practice, Dr. Adrienne Edwards, is our thought-partner in these new initiatives and we can’t wait for you to meet her.

Center for Imagination in the Borderlands is an Indigenous space at ASU where we constellate knowledges, languages and stories across our many borderlands through strategic and exploratory modes of research, conversation, writing, and performance. Essential to our understanding of Indigenousness or Indigeneity is a kinship with our lands and waters—this kinship is both a labor and a tending, a reciprocity and a responsibility, an out-of-timeness that helps us to realize our beingness and actions are of consequence to one another and to the living world around us. Here at ASU and by extension at CIB, we believe deeply that the imaginations shaped in our desert and in these bordered lands are capable of influencing and catalyzing our pasts, presents, and futures.

Toward Morning—Nyamathaam’im—‘Abíní, is part of the 210 Project, a larger initiative which uses seven generations of time, or two-hundred ten years, as a portal to disrupt conventions of time and to imagine old and new ways of engaging our communities and worlds, in language and other makings. There are two words we offer to frame our ideas, questions, and structure for our collective engagement: the Morning as an action, a call to do things differently and anew, and The Tendency, a model of collectivity for how we might come together and “be with” one another. Our use of “Morning” is born out of Indigenous practices of dawn, the arrival of the powerful sun, as Diné scholar Amanda Tachine has described it, and is meant to redirect as well as question the word “future” and our associations with it. In addition, “Morning” sits at the precipice of revolution, a desire for and creation of a new system, which registers to us in its aftermath, in the light of day. This horizon meets us as that which is not yet here, but represents the beginning of what could be when we assess what lies behind us and before us and plot our way forward.

This year’s guest lecturers/performers, speaking on October 22, are Trinidadian-Canadian poet, writer and filmmaker Dionne Brand, Mojave and Akimel O’otham poet Natalie Diaz in collaboration with interdisciplinary artist Maria Hupfield (Anishinaabek), and Māori scholar and educator Leonie Pihama. The following afternoon, on October 23, a second group of artists and scholars will respond to those lectures, including Tendency members Raven Chacon (Diné), Adrienne Edwards, Kelly Lytle Hernandez, Candice Hopkins (Carcross/Tagish First Nation), Cameron Rowland, along with special guests Laura Harris, ralph lemon (former MacArthur Fellow), Brandon Shimoda, Rose B. Simpson (Tewa of Khaʼpʼoe Ówîngeh), Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Māori), Christina Sharpe, and Amanda R. Tachine (Diné).

We are grateful for the opportunity to share this rare constellatory gathering of such incredible thinkers and makers. It is our hope that you join us—in listening, in observing, in wondering, in thinking alongside—toward the many mornings we have yet to rise up in together, as makers of the world.

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All guests will receive a notebook designed by Raven Chacon and Candice Hopkins as well as one of our speakers' books on day 1. On day 2, we'll offer a special edition t-shirt designed by Raven Chacon and Candice Hopkins. Both events will also have a free public reception with appetizers or coffee and pastries.

Registration for each event is separate. See "bit.ly/TMornDay2" or check out the "More Events by this Organizer" section below to get your ticket for our second day events.